In which I will be keeping track (for my own benefit) of my daily progress in the identification of the ant fauna of Tiputini Biodiversity Station in Ecuador, the analysis of that data, and the pursuit of my PhD. And (for the benefit of everyone else) I hope to provide helpful information on ants, taxonomy, database management, identification, and other assorted endeavors. Cheers

Friday, February 02, 2007

So, I finally headed back to Harvard yesterday after having not been for quite awhile. Got lots of stuff done.

I made a date with Stefan to finish looking at my Solenopsis next week. He wrote it in his calendar, so I have high hopes.

I brought Stefan more Solenopsis (sorry!). Mostly reproductives.

I also brought a (long lost) tray of specimens which I had labeled as Carebarella. In a previous post, I wrote about how I discovered that all of my Carebarella turned out to be Solenopsis and I didn't have any Carebarella at all. Well, then I found this tray of Carebarella and some of them really looked like carebarella so I thought I would have Stefan look at them to be sure. Well, most of them were Solenopsis, but some of them were actually Carebarella (Yay!). And some of them turned out to be some sort of a weird Tranopelta that Stefan says looks totally different from other Tranopelta and kind of looks like Dolopomyrmex. So that's cool.

I looked at a couple of male ants that were so distinctive that I thought for sure I would be able to at least put a genus on them. One of them (pictured above) I thought was a male Gigantiops destructor. I still think that is what it is, but Harvard sadly had no males for me to compare it to. Another one I thought looked similar to photos I had seen online of Cylindromyrmex, but was unsure because I hadn't collected any workers of that genus. Well, it is definitely Cylindromyrmex, although I still am not sure what species it is. I compared my specimen to C. meinerti, C. darlingtoni, and C. godmani, and it was definitely not one of those. I will have to investigate further.

I took my small collection of Carebara to be checked but came up empty. None of the species I had identified my specimens to were available at Harvard and of the ones that were, there were mostly queens and hardly any workers. I'll have to figure out another way to confirm those.

I took a tray of Dolichoderus reproductives and was able to ID some of them as D. bidens, but came up short on the rest. I ran out of time, though.

I also took a few more photos of my specimens using the Syncroscopy/Automontage system. I will try to get those up on my website ASAP.